[Foundation-l] Re: stewards and bot flagging

Wed Nov 2 05:34:49 UTC 2005

Angela wrote:
>>There was an objection to this last time it was raised
>>(<http://mail.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2005-Otober/032050.html>),
>>but the main reason it's not possible seems to be technical; there is
>>currently no interface for bureaucrats to be able to do this
>>(<http://bugzilla.wikipedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3855>).
> 
> 
> 
> A letter disappeared from that URL. The correct link was meant to be
> <http://mail.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2005-October/032050.html>.
> 
> Angela.

In that mail, Tim notes

 > It may be that there's not enough active stewards at the moment, and
 > that may be leading to tensions. But I think the system we have has been
 > quite effective in general, so if steward workload is a problem, we
 > should just get more stewards.

But no, I do not think the problem is a workload frankly.
If you look at the page, most of the pending requests are due to the 
fact people making a request do not follow the requirements (in 
particular first asking on their wiki and linking the request page on meta).
And this is in particular for the bots. Many of those asking a bot just 
list a huge collection of languages where they wish the bot to be 
flagged. But that's about it. The problem is that all projects have 
different policies for granting bot access. Some projects have quite 
strict policies and others just do not have any policies. This is 
something very difficult for a steward to just know.

And at the prospective of having to go to each project in turn to 
ask.... well, energies are sinking :-)

Here are a couple of current examples

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_permissions#Sau.C3.B0kindin
request for a bot to work on two projects. There are two links
One goes to a village pump, with no comments there
The other link goes to a page in swedish, with one editor asking a 
question in swedish. The request on meta has been done 3 days after the 
candidacy on sv.
What do we do ?

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_permissions#Chobot
Chobot, to work on about all projects
Nearly no page where we can find approval.
Andre gave approval where the bot had support. Otherwise, the bot is 
pending.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_permissions#Santa
As no consensus was visible, we waiteddddddd
Good thing we waited, the user quited the project and was guilty of cp 
violations. Only editors on the project could know.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_permissions#RobotJcb
Ahhhh, Dallas on meta...

So, no, the problem is not workload.
The problem is editors not following a bunch of basic rules, such as 
gaining consensus on their project first
And the positive side would be that bureaucrats on a local project would 
precisely know what the local rules are about granting a bot. This is 
all I want to point out.

ant